How Do I Escape @everyone In Discord.py?

I'm developing a Discord bot in Python which outputs text based on user input. I want to avoid users getting it to say @everyone (and @here) which would tag and annoy everyone. I t

Solution 1:

The solution I've been using is to insert a zero-width space after the '@'. This will not change the text appearance ('zero-width') but the extra character prevents the ping. It has unicode codepoint 200b (in hex):

message_str = message_str.replace('@', '@​\u200b') 

More explicitly, the discord.py library itself has escape_mentions for that purpose:

message_str = discord.utils.escape_mentions(message_str)

which is implemented almost identically:

defescape_mentions(text):
    return re.sub(r'@(everyone|here|[!&]?[0-9]{17,21})', '@\u200b\\1', text)